Linux Becoming Greater Threat to Microsoft

Linux is causing a great deal of concern among Microsoft’s senior executives; in a recent interview, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer went so far as to call Linux a “cancer.” Rather than attacking Linux directly, other Microsoft senior executives, including Bill Gates, Jim Allchin, and Craig Mundie, chose to attack the Linux business and licensing model, which is based on the GNU General Public License (GPL). There are other open-source licenses, such as the Lesser GNU GPL and the Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) license, but it is the GPL-licensed Linux that is currently getting the attention of the development community and hardware OEMs.

Certainly the concept of “free software” attacks both Microsoft’s business and intellectual property, but more important in the short term, if Linux gains a foothold in the embedded and server operating system (OS) market where Microsoft is currently vulnerable, it will be harder for Microsoft to achieve its vision of widely available .NET-based Web services.